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THE PSYCHOANALYZING OF EUGENE O'NEILL: POSTSCRIPT WHEN I PUBLISHED MY ARTICLE, "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill," in Modern Drama (December 1960 and February 1961), I attempted to trace the development of the psychoanalytical element in his plays, not only from the evidence within the plays themselves and according to the recognition and discussion of this element by the critics, but also from O'Neill's own comments on his knowledge of the subject and on its influence over his writing. But at that time Arthur and Barbara Gelb's prodigious biography, O'Neill, with its vast storehouse of materials from articles, documents, letters, conversations , and interviews bearing on the many aspects of O'Neill's life, thought, and writings had not been published. Scattered through this volume, often without any particular emphasis on their significance , are a considerable number of facts corroborating and extending my speculations on the origins and evidences of O'Neill's interest in psychoanalysis and his assimilations of it into his work.l This despite the fact that he had persisted in maintaining for many years that he knew nothing about it, and that, even if he did know something about it, he could have written his plays simply from his observation and knowledge of human beings and their motives and behavior. This, then, is a Pyrrhonic postscript designed to prove out of O'Neill's own mouth that his knowledge of what he always preferred to call merely the "new psychology" was both earlier in its beginnings and more pervasive in its effects than he wanted the world to believe. But who can blame any literary man, no matter how great, for having such an implicit faith in his own genius? It seems probable that the first opportunity O'Neill had to hear discussions of any consequence about psychoanalysis (which at first meant only Freudianism) was after his arrival at Provincetown in 1916. Here, in the preceding year, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell had produced their satire on the "new psychology," Suppressed Desires, which they described as "a Freudian comedy." (p. 306) Echoes of this occasion were still reverberating during the next summer, as is revealed by the following anecdote involving O'Neill's 1 See, e.g., Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York, 19!12), pp. 662, 699, 740. All further references in this article will be to this book. (150) 1965 PSYCHOANALYZING OF O'NEILL 151 good friend, Art McGinley, whose father later was to appear as the head of the Miller family in Ah, Wilderness! "Bewildered one day by a particularly esoteric conversation about psychoanalysis, McGinley told O'Neill that he didn't know what the Provincetowners were talking about. 'Don't pay any attention,' O'Neill said. 'A lot of them are pretenders.''' (p. 333) Obviously O'Neill must have felt sufficiently well qualified to speak on this new esoteric topic if he pronounced some of its proponents "pretenders" in 1917, even though he had not yet studied it deeply himself. But even before this-in November, 1916-just after his friend, John Reed (who later gained international notoriety as the first important American to defect to Communist Russia) had married Louise Bryant and had then been forced to enter the hospital for a kidney operation, O'Neill immediately moved into the Reed apartment with Louise, who had already been his mistress. As one of the members of the circle later explained this somewhat unconventional but convenient arrangement: "We all had a rationale about sex-we had discovered Freud-and we considered being libidinous a sort of sacred duty." (pp. 323-324) It is, therefore, not surprising to find O'Neill using the new jargon to describe his intentions in Diffrent, which he finished in 1920. Emma, he said, was "universal only in the sense that she reacts def· initely to a definite sex-suppression, as every woman might." "There are objections to the playas pathological, but I protest that is putting the accent where none was intended." (pp. 437, 455) In O'Neill's letter to Martha Carolyn Sparrow in 1929 (printed in my article), he vigorously denied any "conscious use of psychoanalytical material" in...

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